Trust: Creating the Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries (Cancelled)

Entrepreneurial ventures often fail in the developing world because of a lack of something taken for granted in the developed world - trust. Over centuries, the developed world has built customs and institutions such as enforceable contracts, an impartial legal system and credible regulatory bodies, creating a high level of what scholar and entrepreneur Tarun Khanna calls “ambient trust”. However, this is not the case in the developing world. In his latest book Trust: Creating the Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries, Prof. Khanna shows that rather than become casualties of mistrust, smart entrepreneurs can adopt the mindset that, like it or not, it is up to them to weave their own independent web of trust — with their employees, their partners, their clients, their customers, and society as a whole. Using examples from Brazil, China, India, Mexico and elsewhere, Prof. Khanna shows how entrepreneurs can build on existing customs and practices instead of trying to push against them

Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School. He studies the drivers of entrepreneurship in emerging markets as a means of economic and social development. In 2007, he was nominated Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. In 2015, he was named by the Government of India to chair the national commission to help shape the fabric of India’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. Prof. Khanna serves on numerous for-profit and not-for-profit boards in the US and India. He is a co-founder of several entrepreneurial ventures in the developing world, spanning India, China, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Recently, he co-founded Axilor, an incubator in Bangalore. Prof. Khanna has degrees from Princeton University and Harvard University.

Anjani Trivedi is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial trends, policy and companies across Asia. She has previously worked for the Wall Street Journal, where she was a columnist for its financial market analysis and commentary column, Heard on the Street. Prior to that, she wrote for the New York Times, CNN and TIME. She has previously worked at UBS Investment Bank. Ms. Trivedi holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Master’s Degree in Journalism from the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre. (Moderator)

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